Jonathan W. Gray (John Jay College), Heroes in Black: Race, Image, Ideology and the Evolution of Comics Scholarship
Part of the New Directions in African American and African Diasporic Literary and Cultural Studies series. This talk investigates representations of Black Americans in mainstream comics and graphic novels. Given that Black American visibility has often hinged not simply on the documentable fact of one’s presence before an audience, but also on, as Ellison famously put it early in Invisible Man, “the construction of [that audience’s] inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality” Gray’s talk seeks to trace how these twin understandings of illustration—composing a drawing for visual consumption as well as the political project of bringing information long unacknowledged to the fore—function in the graphic narratives published since the Civil Rights movement waned over 40 years ago.